Re: <nettime> Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics

[allan siegel via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hello,
What if Trump is 2/3 Bonaparte and 1/3 fascism, then what? The article has motivated me to get a hold of the book to see what Mr. Jäger really has to say. Based on the article he seems to make some rather ahistorical assumptions; doesn't collective memory have at least some minimal weight in political consciousness? and, some remarks are painted in broad self-contained chronological strokes as if forms of agency don't carry over from one generation to the next? and what about geographical bias? Which is why I would like to see the actual book. 
best
allan


On Fri, Jul 31, 2026, at 13:09, Felix Stalder via nettime-l wrote:
> 
> I haven't read the book, but from the article here, I think two things 
> are useful. One is that Trump doesn't represent fascism, but 
> Bonapartism, ie. not a collective mass movement, but a mass of people 
> joined individually to a singular leader.
> 
> The other is this:
> 
> "They [the far right] are not more organized or more ideologically 
> coherent or more strategic [than the left]; they are just better funded 
> – which puts quite a lot on the shoulders of capital itself as the 
> overarching organizing principle of global politics. Money might not be 
> the only thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting what it wants."
> 
> In other words, somebody is still doing the boring but necessary 
> organizational, institutional work. It's capital.
> 
> Also, there is a great line on Reform UK: "There is just Nigel and a 
> smartphone and then a couple of private donors." (I think this doesn't 
> apply to the far-right in France or Germany.)
> 
> 
> all the best. Felix
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left
> Zoe Williams
> 
> 23.07.2026
> 
> https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/23/anton-jager-groundbreaking-book-being-devoured-by-left
> 
> “I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing Street on 
> Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this 
> street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath all the cabinet 
> gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about the 
> immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate. Is this who 
> we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the next; as 
> passionate about the change we want as we are convinced that those who 
> promise it are incapable of enacting it?
> 
> It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book, 
> Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, is 
> being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New York 
> Times wrote, it’s “among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the 
> political present in all its maddening strangeness”. Still, I think 
> Jäger was surprised to have his honeymoon interrupted so I could 
> interview him about it. Life comes at everyone quite fast in a 
> hyperpolitical age.
> 
> Jäger, 32, raised in Brussels by parents who work in the arts (“bohemian 
> class?” I ask, and he says carefully that they are boho “adjacent”), 
> educated at the University of Essex, then Cambridge, is now a lecturer 
> in the history of political thought and theory at University College, 
> Oxford. He has an intense, angular face and a calm, almost self-effacing 
> manner. His philosophical reference points are Deleuze and Guattari, 
> Mouffe and Laclau, but asked to situate himself in the firmament of the 
> European left, he says simply: “Even with all the baggage and 
> connotations, I still think the easiest thing is to call myself a Marxist.”
> 
> His thinking runs as follows (don’t get hung up on the dates, though 
> some, like 1989, are non-negotiable). The years 1914 to 1989 mark the 
> age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and 
> institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics 
> electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political 
> parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups; 
> they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by 
> coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in 
> concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years 
> often called the “long 90s”) was the age of post-politics, when 
> institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then, 
> we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a 
> time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went to 
> a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to about 
> 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most fluid) was the age of 
> anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and 
> anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the Occupy 
> movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a vengeance, and 
> even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered, these movements still 
> have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in Spain and Greece bore 
> political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US, 
> France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking traditional parties from 
> which the revolutionary intent had long been stripped away.
> protester in a mask that says ‘I can’t breathe’
> A Black Lives Matter protest in London on 6 June 2020 after the killing 
> of George Floyd. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
> 
> Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither 
> institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes, “the 
> Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the 
> mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds 
> apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking 
> set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership 
> rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” As 
> a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge 
> suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political 
> theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s contemporary interpretation of the evocative 
> phrase “bodies without organs”. Modern political movements, he writes, 
> are “concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism”.
> 
> He found this pattern across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation 
> and Development and he only stopped there, he says, because “I don’t 
> have the linguistic and cultural reach to fully tell this story 
> globally”. His descriptions are powerful. He writes of climate strikers 
> and anti-lockdown demonstrators alike as “a myriad animated by brief, 
> potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic influencers and digital 
> demagogues”. And that, you have to admit, is exactly what it looks like.
> 
> These four eras – mass politics, post-politics, antipolitics and 
> hyperpolitics – “are not just concepts,” Jäger says, “they have some 
> empirical data behind them. ‘How institutionalised is society?’ is 
> basically a question of, how does civil society look? How are membership 
> organisations looking? What are the affiliations, what are the types of 
> bonds that people have? That’s not very difficult to quantify. You can 
> look at union membership, you can look at church attendance, you can 
> look at less overtly political forms of belonging. The political axis is 
> more difficult to measure, but not impossible – namely, how many people 
> attend elections, how many people strike, how many people engage in 
> political violence, how many people engage in political communication, 
> write letters to editors or now post online?”
> 
> He argues that the height of mass politics was between the wars. To 
> illustrate this in the book, he lists all the civic organisations during 
> the Great Depression in the small Austrian hamlet of Marienthal – they 
> spanned all human activity, from work to thought to rabbit-breeding. I 
> won’t list them all here but there were many. Considering the effect 
> these organisations might have on the collective psyche, Jäger considers 
> the history of his own family: “On the Flemish side, this meant that the 
> Christian Democratic or the Catholic party was not just a party that 
> said how you were to vote, or which union you joined, but also had a 
> very strong say in what happened in the bedroom. It was a total 
> doctrine, not something that purely applied to your political 
> deportment.” There was little boundary between public and private, and 
> no such thing as a political identity without a membership card. It was 
> personally quite constraining, but it got shit done. (Sidebar, I’ve seen 
> a nascent institutionalised-politics like this, in Manchester, in 2019; 
> the local Momentum group was campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn, but it also 
> had a running club, a knitting group and a book group. I was overcome by 
> the sense of seeing a trade union movement reborn. Needless to say, 
> Corbyn did not win that election. Institution-building can’t be done on 
> the fly.)
> 
> The destruction of political organisations was “not monocausal”, Jäger 
> says, though in the book he puts it squarely on the shoulders of the 
> union busting by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. People lost faith 
> in organisations because the crunchy bit of their leverage – the bit 
> where you get what you want by withdrawing your labour, the bit before 
> all-out war – was taken away. Unions were defanged and workers 
> impoverished, and many ultimately saw their industries collapse in the 
> process.
> 
> Jäger says there were also cultural and generational shifts over decades 
> – people in the 60s and 70s seeking a different relationship with 
> collective institutions, for example, and looking instead for 
> emancipation and equality – so it takes a while for the picture to 
> cohere, and Communist parties remained tenacious through the 1980s in 
> Italy, for instance. “In 1989, suddenly it’s as if there’s a day and 
> night difference,” he says. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of 
> the cold war, he says: “Suddenly everyone deserves to party.”
> Large crowd climb onto the Berlin Wall
> 
> 
> It is a strange sensation to have the 90s narrated back to you by 
> someone who was born in 1994, but it is mainly unsettling because it is 
> so accurate. Tony Blair did describe globalisation as a process as 
> inexorable as the weather, and that is also how neoliberals described 
> the economy – a thing that happened to you. “This is the ambiguity of 
> the post-politics of the 90s,” Jäger says. “Politics is no longer 
> something that you see as effecting large-scale social change, and the 
> forms of liberty that are available to you are now more private, more 
> intimate, more individual. At the same time, the idea that you can 
> collectively bundle together with other individuals and change society 
> starts to appear very, very remote.”
> 
> There was also a lot of beauty to that time, which he describes through 
> the photography of Wolfgang Tillmans and the novels of Annie Ernaux and 
> Michel Houellebecq. We were obsessed with Houellebecq in the 90s, but we 
> will have to talk about why, and the direction his novels took, and 
> whether we will ever again live in a world whose best cultural artefact 
> is the novel, another time. “The fact that Tillmans as a gay man is able 
> to express and experience the rave culture of the 90s and 00s as a new 
> form of collectivity that wasn’t available to him in the 70s and 80s, I 
> don’t think we should deny the liberatory value of this. It very clearly 
> is the case that there are individuals who did not feel at home in the 
> families, or the communities or the neighbourhoods in which they grew 
> up, in which they finally find a kind of new community that is much less 
> demanding and is less exigent than what they had before. The ambiguity 
> is, of course, that it also implies a profound disenchantment and 
> cynicism around what politics can do.” That’s politics with a capital P 
> – you might see a community animated about an issue, but with no faith 
> in parliamentary channels.
> 
> 
> There is a critical and rarely mentioned adjunct to the neoliberal 
> destruction of institutions and the post and antipolitics that came 
> afterwards, which is that it didn’t only come for the left. “Thatcher 
> basically did a controlled demolition of popular Conservatism,” Jäger 
> says, “and replaced much of this with PR spin, and also a lot of private 
> funding, because the idea was: ‘We can get rid of our mass party because 
> we’re in control of the media, we can win elections with that.’” The 
> right today, he says, is just as inconsequential as the left, and for 
> exactly the same reason, that it’s hyper but not formally organised. 
> “The people who go on marches subscribe to the same podcast, might 
> follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on the same Telegram 
> channels, but they don’t have an organisational history they shared 
> before they entered the march. This is different even to the BNP, where 
> marchers had a shared history in football hooliganism, and the National 
> Front. That shared subculture is no longer there.”
> 
> He says this is clear with Reform UK, “which is so heavily 
> leader-dependent. The entire movement is at risk with this scandal of 
> the crypto-billionaire, because there’s no party infrastructure. There 
> is just Nigel and a smartphone and then a couple of private donors.” To 
> me, this fails to take into account that the right is different to the 
> left: they have more money. “Maybe I understated the availability of 
> private funding,” he says mildly. “The fact that we can even talk of a 
> trillionaire, such as Elon Musk, means there’s a complete secession of 
> that individual from what we could even call society. That is a variable 
> in explaining why hyperpolitics on the right thrives and why 
> hyperpolitics on the left has found it much more difficult to achieve 
> tangible results.” They are not more organised or more ideologically 
> coherent or more strategic; they are just better funded – which puts 
> quite a lot on the shoulders of capital itself as the overarching 
> organising principle of global politics. Money might not be the only 
> thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting what it wants.
> 
> 
> The more immediately controversial proposition of the book, though, is 
> that what we are watching in Trump’s US is not fascism, because the 
> right only travels to that extreme in the face of a direct threat of 
> organised socialism. “The left is doing itself too many favours by 
> considering its opponents fascists,” he says. “You’re overestimating 
> your strength. The contemporary far right is more a function of the 
> crisis of liberalism than it is a function of the strength of the left.” 
> What we’re looking at instead, with Trump, is “Bonapartism” says Jäger. 
> He writes that Trump, and everyone else who has ever got ahead by 
> championing the “left behind”, isn’t representing a strong mass movement 
> or class, but, like Napoleon, relying on “the largely passive support of 
> impoverished peasants … not a collective but ‘formed by the simple 
> addition of isomorphous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a 
> sack of potatoes’.” (That bit about potatoes is from Karl Marx’s The 
> Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.) We skirmish a little about the 
> US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a standing army that looks 
> extremely fascist, until Jäger concludes: “The spectrum from fascism to 
> Bonapartism can flip into something more radical. At the same time, I’m 
> still more struck by the differences than the similarities with these 
> 20th-century phenomena.”
> 
> Neal Lawson, guru of Manchesterism and an Anton Jäger fan, lays these 
> arguments over the predicament of our new prime minister. “It isn’t just 
> lack of money Burnham has to contend with but the absence of secure 
> political footings. Temporary hyper-political swarms have taken the 
> place of substantial and secure alliances. He must find a way to surf 
> these volatile waves or be another victim of them.” But we, the volatile 
> waves, also have to figure out how to re-engage with institutions and 
> build new ones, and is that possible? Jäger pauses, dispiritingly, like 
> a mechanic who is about to give you bad news about your fanbelt. “This 
> is an interesting and scary question. We do live in a society in which 
> the incentives for leaving rather than entering organisations are much 
> higher. Recent experience, whether joining a party or joining a union, 
> often militates against the idea that there’s any sense in collective 
> action, and the rational response is helplessness. And yet, 
> repoliticisation is good. Hyperpolitics has increased people’s 
> consciousness of the fact that politics matters.”
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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